Having just help another developer with this issue, I thought I’d write a quick post about the cause of the ObjectDisposedException exception when working with Entity Framework. It is important to be aware of two things when working with Entity Framework 1) The data context must not be disposed of until all the data is fetched from the database. 2) ......

Unlike the release of VB.NET with .NET 4.0, the next release of VB.NET doesn’t have the anything like as many new features, which is almost certainly because the language is really maturing and a lot more parity has been achieved between C# and VB.NET. Async The big new feature for both languages is the introduction of the await/async keywords. I won’t ......

One of the blogs I read is Zain Naboulsi’s Visual Studio Tips and Tricks. In a recent post he discussed the power of using Find and Replace with regular expressions and it gave me an idea about how to quickly reverse a set of assignment statements. Lets say you have the following code: Me.FirstNameTextBox.Text = customer.FirstName Me.LastNameTextBox.Text ......

If like me, you have to turn your hand to design every now and then, you might find some of these useful: Fonts Free for commercial use fonts. http://www.fontsquirrel.com/ More free fonts http://www.1001freefonts.com Colours A very cool flash based colour picker. http://kuler.adobe.com/#cre... Another colour scheme design – all HTML this ......

I’m not a big fan of #region, I use it occasionally but generally try to avoid it. It’s always frustrating to open a code file and be presented with nothing but collapsed regions – sure, it looks neat (and lets face, more than a few programmers are a little OCD) but I want to see the code, that’s why I opened the file in the first place! Don’t worry, ......

I ran into a page on the Microsoft web site that was showing a compile error. It’s fairly unusual but the developers over at MS are only human and they are going to make mistakes sometimes. What I thought was particularly interesting was that the CustomErrors option in their web.config was set to Off, showing the full source code of the page. The page ......

I spent ages this morning trying to find a way to determine if a user has permission to access a page before navigating to it. I knew it was possible, the SiteMapProvider has a property called “SecurityTrimmingEnabled” that hides pages that the user cannot access. In the end I found a really useful object called UrlAuthorizationModule in the System.Web.Security ......

A while ago (in fact, it was two mobile phones ago) I had a non-touch phone. Most apps worked well but every now and again I wished I had a point and click interface. As I was trying to scroll around a particularly large web page I had an idea: What if the phone screen was a window and you scrolled it around by moving the phone itself? Almost all phones ......

Having written about the new features planned for VB.NET 10, I’ve been meaning to write about what to expect in ASP.NET 4.0, specifically what is happening around webforms. Well, Mike Ormond has written an excellent blog post on just that subject so I like to him instead: ASP.NET 4.0 Webforms Enhancements Enjoy ......